248. TIRESIAS, FROM OTHER PERSPECTIVES: Tiresias makes a range of appearances in other works of literature, although he is frequently presented as a blind soothsayer with stern advice. In addition to Ovid (note 218), Homer (note 245) and Dante (note 246), see Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 468-474 (429 BCE, tr. Francis Storr, 1921), where Tiresias curses Oedipus:
“Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared
To twit me with my blindness--thou hast eyes,
Yet see'st not in what misery thou art fallen,
Nor where thou dwellest nor with whom for mate.
Dost know thy lineage? Nay, thou know'st it not,
And all unwitting art a double foe
To thine own kin, the living and the dead.”
See also Sophocles, Antigone 5:79-83 (441 BC, tr. Francis Storr, 1912), where Tiresias curses King Creon for threatening to bury his niece Antigone alive:
“I prophesy. For, yet a little while,
And sound of lamentation shall be heard,
Of men and women through thy desolate halls;
And all thy neighbor States are leagues to avenge
Their mangled warriors who have found a grave
I' the maw of wolf or hound.”
Compare this passage to the dog that would “dig it up again” at lines 74-75. The “desolate halls” of Thebes can also be compared to the desolate streets of Jerusalem at Jeremiah* 33:3 (see note 27) and of Babylon at Revelation* 18:19 (see note 209) and ultimately to the unreal city of London (see note 60).
For another king sternly advised by Tiresias, see Euripides, The Bacchae (406 BCE), in which King Penteus was warned not to cross Dionysus, the god of fertility. When Penteus ignores Tiresias, the god’s female followers, the doglike Maenads (the “raving ones”), tear him apart limb for limb. Euripides was said to have died a similar death shortly after writing this play; see Satyrus, Life of Euripides (ca. 250 BCE). Compare the assault on fertility to the infertile image of Mr. Eugenides and his pocket full of currants (see note 210) and to Frazer’s Artemis, goddess of fertility, being hung in effigy (see note 55).
For an alternative cause of Tiresias’s blindness, see Callymachus, The Bathing of Pallas (ca. 250 BCE), in which Tiresias is blinded after seeing Pallas bathing. Compare this to Ovid’s Actaeon being killed by his own dogs after watching Diana bathe (see note 197), and also to the fate of King Penteus, above.
Finally, reflecting the Tiresias of line 219, see Guillaume Apollinaire, The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), a French play described by its author as “a surrealistic drama,” thus coining a new word in modern art. Surrealism was not fully defined as a movement until after The Waste Land, although it was directly preceded by the more current trend of Dadaism (see note 419).
GROPING AWAY: Line 247 is enigmatically missing a subject, but in context it is either Tiresias himself, being blind and groping, or the carbuncular guest, being the patronizing third person and a departing lover (line 250) or, in the spirit of note 218, a melting of both, and all. At the end of the scene, he “gropes his way” out of the room. Compare Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: The Grand Inquisitor (1880, tr. Constance Garnett 1912) (also cited at notes 306 and 367): In Ivan’s dramatic “poem,” Christ’s only answer to his inquisitor is a kiss:
“The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”
Christ, like the Ovidian Tiresias “groping into sudden night” (see note 218), then leaves into “the dark alleys of the town.”
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